41–50 of 65 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Windows and DOS do have good documents. I actually think they had way better ones than Linux at the time. But I could be wrong. For reference: https://jacobfilipp.com/msj-index/ And also MSDN.
Was MSDN always free? I remember their access prices for the services in the late 90s and early 00s were eyewatering.
The section coding.pdf has their code style guidelines, colloquially known as Cutler Normal Form, CNF for short. I'm conflicted on it. Definitely overly verbose, but you can't argue with the results of the NT team. Such a rigid style guide almost feels like the technical version of a dress code. And there's an idea called "enclothed cognition" which is like, if you wear a business suit to work, it exerts a subconscio…
> Note that the NT OS/2 system does not use the Hungarian naming convention used in some of the other Microsoft products.
So.. you had _all_ this.. and for some reason just didn't want turn it into a useful set of "man" pages in your OS? If they had their eye on the actual ball they wouldn't need to write Halloween memos and rant about developers on stage.
Microsoft's eye wasn't on open sourcing their OS and describing the deep internals. They still don't want you to develop against the NT API, even though developers certainly do (and Microsoft makes compatibility shims for applications which do, when required).
Software that is poorly documented, has no stable api, and no way of accepting extensions other than modifying the source, is not very 'free', in the sense, that if I have a good idea, I'll have crazy amounts of trouble getting the change to users even if I manage to decipher and modify the source appropriately.
This approach describes many software projects. If I wanted to change GCC in a way the original authors didn't approve of, I'd have to fork the entire project and lobby the maintainers to include my versions.
If I wanted to change most MS stuff, like Office, I could grab the COM object out of a registry, and override it with mine, just to list one example. Then I could just put the binary on my website, and others would be able to use it.
As for MS not publishing these particular docs - its not like MS doesnt publish tomes on everything, including the kernel. If you're interested in Windows Internals, I recommend the book series of the same name by Pavel Yosifovich, or really anything by him or Mark Rusinovich.
Its also a testament to the solidity of Windows' design that tons of stuff written decades ago is still relevant today.
> The first release of NT is planned as a workstation product that will provide a strong competitor to UN*X based workstations. UN*X spelling for trademark reasons or a joke that UNIX is verboten at Microsoft?
I think trademark, I remember Bill Gates referring to Windows NT as "a better UNIX than UNIX".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was MSDN always free? I remember their access prices for the services in the late 90s and early 00s were eyewatering.
If I recall, MSDN was super expensive but that is because it included non-commercial licenses for just about everything Microsoft shipped as well as getting hard copies of the documentation and a bunch of other stuff. If you just wanted to do c++ windows programming you can get visual studio which, I believe, did come with Win32 documentation (especially as CD roms became common distro methods). The c++ software deve…
The section coding.pdf has their code style guidelines, colloquially known as Cutler Normal Form, CNF for short. I'm conflicted on it. Definitely overly verbose, but you can't argue with the results of the NT team. Such a rigid style guide almost feels like the technical version of a dress code. And there's an idea called "enclothed cognition" which is like, if you wear a business suit to work, it exerts a subconscio…
It's also important to remember that a ton of things we take for granted now simply didn't exist (source code control was in its infancy, merging was shit, syntax highlighting was minimal at best, compiling took time, etc).
The section coding.pdf has their code style guidelines, colloquially known as Cutler Normal Form, CNF for short. I'm conflicted on it. Definitely overly verbose, but you can't argue with the results of the NT team. Such a rigid style guide almost feels like the technical version of a dress code. And there's an idea called "enclothed cognition" which is like, if you wear a business suit to work, it exerts a subconscio…
It's also important to remember that a ton of things we take for granted now simply didn't exist (source code control was in its infancy, merging was shit, syntax highlighting was minimal at best, compiling took time, etc).